Names

2023 Award for Best Article in NAMES

I. M. Nick — 2024-03-12

For more than a decade, the American Name Society has singled out an outstanding article to be given the Best Article of the Year Award. To select the publication to receive this prestigious honor, each member of the Editorial Board independently reviewed all of the articles that had been published in 2023. As per ANS tradition, obituaries, notes, editorials, book reviews, and articles contributed by the Editor-in-Chief were excluded from consideration. To make their decision, Board Members were asked to select the publications which they felt possessed the highest degree of creativity; demonstrated the best writing style; employed the soundest research methodology; and had the greatest potential to make a lasting and significant contribution to onomastics. This report details the results of that selection process and reveals the 2023 winner of the ANS Best Article of the Year award.

Name of the Year Report 2023

I. M. Nick — 2024-03-12

On January 4, 2024, the American Name Society continued its long-standing tradition and conducted the Name of the Year selection (NoY). The 2023 online vote was chaired by ANS President, Laurel Sutton, and ANS Information Officer, Brandon Simonson. This report gives a summary of this year’s NoY deliberations and offers readers background information about some of the onomastic nominations and decision-making.

Book Review

Rebekah R. Ingram — 2024-03-12

The Names of the Wyandot. By John Steckley. Oakville, Ontario: Rock’s Mills Press. 2023. Pp. 291. (Paperback) $13.44 CAD. ISBN 13: 978-1-77244-264-9.

Book Review

Daniel Duncan — 2024-03-12

Place Names: Approaches and Perspectives in Toponymy and Toponomastics. By Francesco Perono Cacciafo and Francesco Cavallaro. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2023. Pp. 298. (Paperback) $34.99. ISBN 13: 978-1-108-74824-7.

Uniqueness and agency in English Naming Practices of Mainland Chinese Students

Robert Weekly — 2024-03-12

In diaspora and post-colonial communities, ethnic Chinese people tend to adopt names that are common in majority English-speaking countries. Compared to these communities, less attention has been paid to mainland Chinese, where the practice of adopting an English name is in the process of becoming normalised among the current generation of fifteen to thirty-five-year-olds. This paper is part of a wider project to examine the English naming practices of Chinese students from mainland China. It focuses specifically on name choices and the reasons for these choices. A 44-item questionnaire was completed by 357 mainland Chinese students, and this paper reports the quantitative data relevant to name choices and the reasons behind them. The results display an array of preferred English names and suggest that one of the key aspects of name choice is the uniqueness of the name, which served multiple purposes: distinguishing themselves from the peers, enabling them to be remembered, and expressing their identity. Additionally, Chinese students demonstrated a high degree of agency in their name choices, which was evident in the creative approaches used in name selection.

Chinese Onomasticons of Posthumous Names

Yegor Grebnev — 2024-03-12

This paper provides a brief introduction to Chinese posthumous names. This name system is based on the opposition between positive and negative evaluations of the deceased. It was employed as a means for negotiating legitimacy and shaping the historical record. This article also provides information on the “Order of Posthumous Names Explained”, a chapter of the Neglected Zhou Scriptures. This chapter is a canonical source for the study of Chinese posthumous names. It is commonly seen by scholars as an ancient onomasticon used to assign posthumous names. This paper argues that, in its present form, this chapter is a complex medieval compilation of multiple earlier sources. This paper counters the narrow interpretation of onomasticons of Chinese posthumous names as manuals for assigning names to the deceased. Instead, it postulates that onomasticons of posthumous names were also used as aids in the interpretation of history. They provided meaningful moralistic interpretations for the posthumous names attested in historical sources.

Actant Models of Kazakh Anthroponyms-Composites with Substantive and Verb Components

Zifa Temirgazina — 2024-03-12

The Kazakh anthroponymicon during its centuries-old history did not experience serious pressure from religious and state institutions and therefore is characterized by a high degree of non-formalization. It has preserved the ancient traditions of naming, which are based on cultural and gender stereotypes: firstly, the preference for the birth of a male baby; and secondly, the birth of a boy child that is considered as a gift of higher sacred powers. This article explores a group of male anthroponyms formed as a result of the addition of substantive forms and the verbs tuu ‘to be born’, kelu ‘to come’, and beru ‘to give’. They retain syntactic relations that go back to the original sentence: propositional semantics and actant models. Complex two-part anthroponyms belong to polypropositive structures; the primary proposition for all of them is the proposition ‘A child was born’. Further, depending on the semantics and valency of the verbal component, there are situations of a reward, a birth time with different actants. In the surface structure of the anthroponym, depending on the relevance for those who give the name, in addition to the predicate, actants of various types are verbalized, such as agent, patient, and donor. In addition to the dictum content, the considered names include modal meanings: an evaluative mode, intention, which are expressed implicitly. Names-wishes and names-thanksgiving are distinguished depending on the intention.

Navigating Linguistic Similarities Among Countries Using Fuzzy Sets of Proper Names

Davor Lauc — 2024-03-12

This paper examines the commonalities among several countries and languages through the lens of proper names, especially forenames. It posits that the investigation of these names offers a fresh perspective on language similarity due to their distinct influence from cross-cultural interactions and language contact compared to regular vocabulary. The study introduces a novel measure that generalizes the similarity between sets by considering the distances between elements. This metric is employed to assess phonetic commonalities in forenames. The results of this analysis show a notable correlation between the commonality of proper names across languages and the overarching commonality of the languages themselves. In addition, the forename commonalities also provided more insights. As this investigation shows, proper names can also serve as a potentially potent metric for language similarity and may be used to unveil additional cultural commonalities and disparities among nations. The paper concludes by addressing the constraints of this research and discussing prospects for subsequent studies.